Thursday, May 20, 2010

Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs

Religious beliefs contain both natural and supernatural elements.
The natural elements do more than the supernatural ones to make systems
of religious belief rationally untenable in light of science.

Moses at Sinai: lithograph by F. W. McCleave, 1877

There is a common tendency—at least, it seems to me very widespread—to
equate religion with religious belief. Whatever convenience such an
equation may have for thinking about Christianity, it makes nonsense of Judaism. To
say that someone “practices Judaism” is perfectly intelligible; to say
that someone “believes Judaism” is a bizarre combination of
words.

Nonetheless, it is plain that there are Jewish beliefs, that is,
beliefs characteristic of Judaism, or at least of this or that variety
or denomination of Judaism. Some of these beliefs may even be
considered to be foundational, in the sense that they provide a
rationale for religious observances. The nineteenth-century movement to
preserve
traditional Jewish observances called itself
“Orthodoxy”—“correct belief”—for a reason: it also meant to preserve,
or rather to establish, a body of specifically Jewish doctrine or
dogma. [1]

But what sorts of beliefs may be
counted as religious ones? Consider the following three propositions as
examples:

The Torah (i.e., the Pentateuch) was written down in the Sinai
desert by Moses more than three thousand years ago.

The Torah was dictated to Moses by God.

God exists.

All three of these are, I take it, Jewish religious beliefs. But they
are plainly different in their relation to natural fact.

The first
proposition does not imply, or at least need not be
interpreted as implying, any supernatural element. It concerns
a matter of historical, or more broadly natural fact.

The second proposition has both a natural and a supernatural element.
The natural element is just what is stated in (1), that the
Torah was written down by Moses more than three thousand years ago. The
supernatural element is the idea that this writing-down was a taking of
divine dictation. (I use the phrase “written down” rather than simply
“written” so as not to exclude that idea a priori: to
say that the Torah was
written by Moses might be understood to imply that he was
its author rather than merely, as per (2), its original scribe.)

The third proposition I take to be of purely supernatural significance.
Of course, I have not tried to define the terms “natural” and
“supernatural,” but rather than take on that difficult task, I will
simply take the two terms to be sufficiently well understood for my
purposes. My three examples are meant to illustrate the distinction
that I propose among three kinds of religious belief: (1) natural
beliefs, (2) mixed natural–supernatural beliefs, and (3) purely
supernatural beliefs.

The points that I want to make about these three kinds of belief are
the following. First, while people tend to identify religious belief
with beliefs of the third type, such as the belief that God exists or
beliefs about the divine nature, a
very large part of religious belief consists of natural elements. In
consequence, many religious beliefs are not essentially religious, in the sense
that they are such that it is possible for someone to believe them
without accepting any
religious doctrine that contains it. Someone might, for instance,
believe that Moses wrote the Torah in the Sinai desert without
believing that God had anything to do with the matter.

Second, natural and supernatural elements are often tightly connected.
For instance, though someone might believe that Moses wrote down the
Torah but not believe that he did so under divine dictation, no one can
believe
that God dictated the Torah to Moses without believing that Moses wrote
it down. That is a matter of logic. Other connections are a matter of
psychology. Thus, while it is possible to believe, say, that a
worldwide flood killed all land animals but those on Noah’s ark without
believing that God had any hand in it, it is not likely that anyone—any
adult of much education at any rate—would ever do so. That is, many
natural religious beliefs are held only because of some
accompanying supernatural religious belief.

Third, to the extent that a body of religious belief contains natural
elements, it is subject to critical examination in the light of
science. If it were established that the Torah was written down by
Moses in the desert more than three thousand years ago, scientific
investigation would be powerless to settle the question whether he was
taking divine dictation. But the fact is that no such hypothesis is
established, or, in view of the evidence, capable of being established.
On the contrary, the findings of archaeological investigation as well
as textual analysis render the belief that the Torah was written all at
once, hundreds of years before the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and
Judah, completely untenable. [2]

Fourth, even if the supernatural as such is beyond the reach of scientific criticism, mixed natural–supernatural beliefs are not. If it can be proved that the Torah was written hundreds of years after the time in which even the latest events recounted in it are purported to take place—which it can, unless one understands “prove” to signify a standard of certainty that is never attained in any empirical science—then the idea that Moses wrote it under divine dictation is also thereby refuted.

Fifth and finally—though this is not a point for which I shall be
supplying the necessary argument in this entry—Judaism, like
Christianity, is thoroughly dependent on natural beliefs and mixed
natural–supernatural beliefs that are rationally untenable in the light
of known evidence and scientific arguments. Even if purely supernatural
beliefs, such as the belief in an almighty and supremely wise and
benign creator and ruler of the universe, are given a free pass,
specific natural and mixed beliefs are required for supporting a body
of specific religious observances; and some of the most important of
those beliefs are not rationally tenable.

REFERENCES

[1] On the question of preserving versus establishing, see Menachem
Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything?
(London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006).

4 comments:

I would like religion to try to purge itself of what you call natural beliefs (wishful thinking obviously) After all the denial of Mosaic authorship although dear to many actually is not necessary to Judaism. What I like about the Conservative approach to divine authorship (DH with divine inspiration) is that it has NO natural beliefs its purely a question of did Divine Inspiration occur which of course is not something history or science can tell you.

>Judaism, like Christianity, is thoroughly dependent on natural beliefs and mixed natural–supernatural beliefs that are rationally untenable in the light of known evidence and scientific arguments.

Even Orthodox Judaism could do away with belief in Biblical history and still continue functioning pretty much the same. All you really need to believe is someway somehow God inspired/directed the holy writings of Judaism so therefore these writing are then themselves holy and contain God's message. That is not a "natural" belief. If you mean Orthodox Judaism as it stands then yeah you're right it does rely on a lot of natural beliefs.

Are there any other natural beliefs you have in mind besides Mosaic authorship?

Shalmo (is the name derived from "Shalom" by anagram?), are you sure that that is the phrasing of the saying? "One should study it (Torah) to be one (a Jew)" is very unclear to me. Does it mean "If one is a Jew, then one should study Torah"? Or "If one is a Jew, then one should study how (properly) to be a Jew by studying Torah"? Or something else? Certainly the Jews are, collectively, the people of the Torah, but there seem to be plenty among them who have no relationship with Torah -- that is, people who count as Jewish and who may even so count themselves but who know or care nothing of Torah. The best that one can say is that they are the descendants of people (persons) who had such a relationship.